analogy, just as magnolias cannot be reduced to one sex, neither can the speaker’s gender
be essentialised, nor reduced to genitalia. But unlike her stepfather, Marissa does not
discriminate on the basis of gender: she picks the speaker a flower and, metaphorically, as a
friend regardless of hirs gender-nonconforming identity. Furthermore, by giving the speaker
the magnolia blossom, Marissa simultaneously provides the speaker (and reader) with hope
for a future in which others can accept his trans identity and see beyond the boundaries of
binary gender.
The titular poem “Boy with Flowers” continues the flower-as-body analogy, but in
relation to the speaker’s adult body post-surgery. So far, this paper has focused on the
speaker’s experiences pre-transition. But it will now explore how Shipley writes about the
physical aspects of gender transition. In stanza 8, the naked body is put on display as we
watch the speaker’s lover:
… tracing fingertips
around two long incisions in my chest. Each sewn tight
with stitches, each a naked stem, flaring with thorns. 8
We live in a society in which judgments about one’s gender are often based on the appearance
of one’s physical body. Over time these signifiers become exaggerated. Men tend to grow
beards and women tend to develop breasts – and it only takes a quick glance at these
attributes to confirm our opinions about a person’s gender. As a result, many trans people
suffer a misreading of their gender identity and are left with a feeling of entrapment within the
‘wrong’ body—or rather trapped in society’s perceptions of that body. In the above scene, the
speaker has undergone a double mastectomy in attempt to physiologically masculinise the
body. The breasts have been removed, leaving a flat, masculine contour on which the lover
can trace their fingertips. Having spent hirs whole life being misgendered, the breasts can no
longer be read as absolute signifiers of the speaker’s ‘natural’ (read: socially assigned)
femininity.
In this sense, surgery has enabled the speaker to transform hirs body so that it visibly
aligns with hirs internal and invisible sense of gender. 9 The scars reflect this process by
physically and symbolically reversing the relations between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’
characterising the poems thus far: the speaker’s internal body image of hirself as male has
become externalised and facilitated through surgery, through the scars. But it is important to
remember that this is just the beginning of the speaker’s transition, which Shipley signals
8
9
Ely Shipley, “Boy with Flowers,” in Boy with Flowers (New York: Barrow Street Press, 2008), 9.
Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1998), 115.
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